Community mental health workers in south Auckland have called off their periodic strike action after managers agreed to hire extra staff and provide more beds.
Presented with the agreement today in the Employment Court, Judge Graeme Colgan discharged the interim ban he had placed on the action by the workers at the Counties Manukau District Health Board in December.
The strikes were a response to the overcrowding of mental health facilities, which has often led to patients bedding down in corridors, being held in police cells, or being discharged prematurely.
Stating that patient overcrowding was unsafe, the workers, members of the Public Service Association, last year began their campaign of strikes, aimed at persuading the board to increase beds and staff.
Two hours after giving notice to management that the board's Tiaho Mai acute unit was about to go over its approved number of patients, 50, they would stop working.
There were about 10 such stoppages by community staff in the six weeks before Christmas.
Association organiser Ashok Shankar said after today's court hearing he hoped to reach a similar agreement to end the threat of strikes by members at Tiaho Mai.
They call management in to run it during overcrowded periods.
"In the last nine months we've only taken that action once, for 10 minutes, and since then it's never been over numbers," Mr Shankar said.
The board's mental health services manager, Ian McKenzie, said practical details of today's agreement were yet to be finalised.
But the essential points were that at least five more jobs would be created in the community teams, and 10 more "packages of care" would be implemented/purchased in response to recommendations from a review by the Mental Health Commission last year.
The packages, designed around the needs of individual patients, were likely to focus on supported accommodation or intensive rehabilitation in the community, but might also require some clinical services.
The result would be to free up for other patients the beds these 10 people often needed in Tiaho Mai.
- HERALD STAFF
South Auckland health workers' strike averted
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